Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (13 page)

    
He
hopped a swiftly flowing runoff trench and scrambled over a cluster of boulders
just beneath the wooded notch where Johnny’s trailer sat on cinder blocks.
Trailer
was a generous description. It
was more like a large camper, vintage 1970, and wedged into its spot as tightly
and improbably as Aquino had suggested. A road of sorts snaked its way up to
the site, with space enough to pull in three or four cars on the triangle of
land before the trailer, but it was impassable now, cleaved by the rain into a
delta of tributaries. A monsoon season like this one would have killed both
Johnny’s social life and his business activities.

    
With its
peacock emblazoned broadside blocking the mouth of a wider canyon beyond, the
vehicle had an unmistakably defensive stance. The hammering rain and withering
sun had chipped and faded the spray enamel, but the image of the big bird still
telegraphed warning. It wasn’t hard to imagine that the trailer’s original
owner had been a smuggler or a survivalist, and had positioned it so as to
control access to the gulch. Its fortress elevation would have provided
advantage over any IRS or ATF agents who came snooping, and maybe this—and
memories of Ruby Ridge—was partly why the law had left Johnny alone. Maybe it
was also partly why his killers had waited to strike until he’d left the nest.
The embankments on either side were so steep that a visitor could not approach
without being exposed—another guerrilla trick the boys might have picked up in
Iraq.

    
He took
another look at the peacock before heading around back.
Why a peacock
? he mused.
Why
not a raptor of some sort
? Something else to ask Hildegarde about.

    
Whatever
its original use had been, the area on the far side of the trailer was a
natural dance floor, a massive slab of granite about the size of a small ice
rink. Johnny and Henry had made this Party Central, and evidence of revelry
remained in the cheap Japanese lanterns strung through the cottonwoods and
dangling like sodden orange cocoons over the flat, gray expanse. Even muted
color leapt from the monochrome backdrop, and Raszer paid attention. In
contrast, the waterlogged mattresses strewn around the perimeter, some folded
over or pulled back into the privacy of the brush, were virtually camouflaged
by the drabness. Fire pits had become cesspools; in some of them, beer cans
still floated and used condoms bobbed like dead, swollen fish against the
banks. It was not a shot for the Sierra Club calendar.

    
The
initial survey told only the story Raszer already knew: that Johnny and his
pals had, for a time, staged their own postmillennial version of Woodstock in
this canyon. The mounts for Johnny’s huge loudspeakers remained where he’d
placed them, braced with steel strapping halfway up the trunks of twin sycamore
trees. A power plug hung impotently above a plywood shell that must have housed
his generator. In its vicinity, Raszer
 
could still smell gasoline fumes.

    
He cast
a sidelong glance at the dance floor, the ceremonial ground of Johnny’s
nihilistic tribe, and, using his peripheral vision like a good shaman, could
almost see the Endicott sisters dancing with their shirtless warriors, arms
flailing, eyes glazed with amphetamine ice. Despite the evidence of orgiastic
sex, the vibe of the place was distinctly unerotic, and the dope Johnny had
dealt would not have altered that state. Speed, nitrous, and pet tranquilizer were
not the makings of either love-fest or vision quest. They were, however, a
recipe for collective paranoia, an all-too-familiar trait of the marginalized
groups Raszer had come to know. It began with flight from society and proceeded
to isolation and autocracy, then to the mythos of Us versus Them, and finallyto
guns. Sooner or later, the guns brought on the very cataclysm the great leader
had prophesied, for power had to be met with power.

    
Johnny
Horn, along with his minister of propaganda, Henry Lee, had been executed, but
not by agents of the state. They had been executed, Raszer sensed, by a state
without borders, governed by a constitution without principle. The longer
Raszer stood, the more the poison of the place got into him, until he found himself
almost unable to move. He realized he’d been stalling; he still needed to
investigate the trailer.

    
Begin
, he’d once been taught by a
Chumash tracker, with smell.
Close your
eyes
. First, there was the pungency of locked-in damp, of mildew, of a
hundred yeasty organisms replicating themselves behind the trailer’s fake
paneling and exposed insulation. That odor dominated and had to be dismissed
before the subtler scents revealed themselves. More precisely, it had to be
normalized as the ambient smell of the place, then shifted to the background.
Smell with your skin
, the Indian had
told him,
not only with your nose
.
This was more difficult, but it could
be learned and had a basis in both physiology and in the altered consciousness
of synesthesia. The lingering effects of Hildegarde’s root tea gave him just
enough of a boost to get there.

    
Although
the trailer had been stripped of everything absorbent but the rock-wool
insulation in its walls, it retained the locker-room odor of men in their
natural state. Underlying this, however, were a number of scents that fired off
recognition in different parts of Raszer’s brain. Gunpowder. Grain alcohol. The
alkaline signature of amphetamine sweat. And two distinctive smells that did
not seem to quite belong there: the unmistakable aroma of cloves, as from an
herbal cigarette, and patchouli oil. For some reason, Raszer immediately tied
the cloves to Henry Lee, but he could not account for the patchouli. It was as
if some residual trace of the trailer’s original inhabitants had imprinted
itself there, as if some atomic memory of 1970 was etched on the stale air in
this flimsy aluminum time capsule. For a moment, Raszer felt dizzy and put a
hand out to steady himself. On occasion, such sensory dislocation led to blackouts,
and the blackouts induced fleeting visions, but he was not ready for the kind
of visions this place might bring. Recovered, he moved across the floor and
picked up one more scent: wintergreen, as in lifesavers or breath mints. Funny,
the molecules of scent that remained in a place. He reasoned there must be a
wad of chewing gum stuck somewhere.

    
The
police had removed more than half of the wall paneling, and Raszer muttered, “Shit,”
knowing that these must be the pieces etched or markered with slogans, insignias,
and possibly even phone numbers. He could and would get access to the evidence,
but it wasn’t the same as seeing it in situ.
There were discolorations and mounting holes where the double bunks and
drop-down dining table had been. These also had been taken away. All that was
left in place, aside from electrical fixtures, were the plastic molding strips
that ran along the base of the trailer’s walls, and the privy: a tiny sink with
a foot pump for cold water, and a toilet with one of those foam-rubber seats
popular in the ’70s, now yellowed and cracked in two dozen places.

    
Raszer
dropped down to his knees, removed a penknife from the pocket of his duster,
and ran its blade behind the molding on all four walls, hoping its forward edge
would strike something—a folded note, a hidden photograph. As there had been at
least three permanent residents, plus the occasional girlfriend or comrade,
crashing in this two-bed space, a lot of sleeping had probably been done on the
floor, up against these walls. Raszer would have been content with a matchbook,
a coin—any talisman once held by any of the principals—but he came up empty.
With a grimace, he stood and faced the toilet.

    
He
lifted the seat with the toe of his boot and squatted down. Urine and vomit had
hardened on the rim. Good DNA, if anyone cared to check it. He was about to
rise, when he noticed that something had been scrawled on the underside of the
seat with a blue ballpoint pen. For whom to see? Who writes on the underside of
a toilet seat?

    
The suppositions
ticked in: someone on his knees, possibly nauseous, certainly stoned out of his
mind, suddenly remembers something he doesn’t wish to forget and doesn’t want
to share. The handwriting was poor, the hand shaky, but it appeared to be
 
a website address and a name, perhaps a
contact’s. Raszer took out his little Mamiya digital and snapped a bracketed
series of exposures. The ink was smeared in four places, but from what he could
make out, the inscription read:
a—-n-uts.com
, and the name
Hazid
.

    
He took a small spiral notepad from his inside
pocket and wrote out the letters with underlined blanks between them, like the
child’s game Hangman. This was not the time for crossword puzzles. The game
could be played in his moonlight hours, when he kept long vigils reading or
learning a new language at his slate-topped bar, abetted by speedballs of
espresso and absinthe. At least he had something. He stood up, took one more
look around, and left the trailer.

    
When he
stepped out, he saw that the light had changed, marking what must be a break in
the clouds, and that the false dawn of evening so characteristic of the
mountain West—the last flare of golden light before the sun’s candle was
extinguished—had settled over the canyon, making the mist slightly luminous.
Only a slice of sky was visible from the ravine, so he couldn’t see the light’s
source, but about two hundred yards deeper into Johnny’s gulch, where the
chaparral grew thick, there stood an old California live oak whose tiny,
reflective leaves shimmered as if spotlit. Passing beneath the string of
dripping paper lanterns, Raszer proceeded toward the light.

    
Back in
the brush there was more detritus: beer cans, empty half-gallon bottles of
Everclear and Jack Daniel’s, a girl’s abandoned halter top, and a spent
nitrous-oxide tank. Fifty yards before the oak tree, the undergrowth gave way
to what looked like it had once been a footpath. The San Gabriel Front Range
was crisscrossed with such easements, most of them cut like ley lines almost a
century ago, when weekend hikes were part of any healthy regimen and the spirit
of John Muir loomed large. Beyond the tree, the path—though arched by creosote
and mountain sage—appeared to widen. Could this be the passage that Johnny’s
trailer was meant to seal off?

    
With the
light fading fast, his feet improperly shod, and the Coronado Lodge still to
visit, an extended ramble was out of the question, so Raszer set a bend at the
base of a rock face a quarter mile ahead as his turnabout. When he reached it,
however, there was further enticement. It was a trailhead, marked by a small
granite obelisk inscribed with the following:

E
ast
F
ork
T
railhead
.6
m

B
ridge
to
N
owhere
2.4
m

    
Had he
another two hours to spare, Raszer would not have hesitated, boots or no boots.
How could any investigator of final things pass up something called the Bridge
to Nowhere? But he was rewarded, in any event, for his curiosity, because on
the rock face that revealed itself as he came around the bend,
someone—evidently dangling from a rappel line—had spray-painted these
travelers’ tips:

E
x
nihilo ad nihilo

S
uicide
is the ultimate act of personal autonomy

    
From
nothing to nothing.

    
If a
thousand things about this case were still as muddy as the soles of his boots,
one thing, at least, was becoming clear: Johnny Horn and Henry Lee had found in
Iraq—if not before that—a symbiosis of action and ideology. With Johnny as
heart and Henry as head, they had taken gameboy nihilism, anti-authoritarian
resentment, and some novel blend of heavy-metal magick and near-Eastern myth,
and captivated a group of small-town kids. On record, their World Anarchist
Reform Movement seemed to have made little noise, but maybe—just maybe—they had
attracted the notice of some big players who’d initially found them useful, and
then—in a classic reversal—declared them just as expendable. But on the key
question, the
why
of Katy Endicott’s
abduction, there was so little to go on that even Aquino’s virgin-sex-ring idea
had some weight .

    
At this
very early stage of his investigation, Raszer was inclined to stick with what
he called identity motives—that Katy was a victim precisely because she
was
what she was: a formerly devoted
member of a rigid Christian sect that insisted on unquestioning obedience. He
doubted he would have much more than that until he’d spoken to two people:
Emmett Parrish and Ruthie Endicott.

    
The
light from the low sun scrolled down the face of the rock, which was in fact
the flat side of a boulder more than forty feet high. Other inscriptions
materialized from the pink granite like invisible ink—some no more than
initials, others in the faded colors and Aquarian luster of Day-Glo paint—until
the vast canvas stood as a chronicle of the past half century and a wailing
wall reflecting the descent from postwar aspiration to postmodern despair.